Arcangelo Sassolino Opens First Australian Solo Show at MONA

Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino (born 1967 in Vicenza) presents his first solo exhibition in Australia, titled 'in the end, the beginning', at MONA – Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania. The show opens on June 7, 2025, coinciding with the Dark Mofo winter solstice festival, and runs until April 6, 2026. The centerpiece is a new version of Sassolino's installation 'Diplomazija astuta', originally created for the Malta Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. In the work, molten steel heated to 1500°C drips from the ceiling, creating an explosion of incandescent sparks upon hitting the ground. The artist cites Caravaggio's 1608 painting 'The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist' (housed in La Valletta) as inspiration for the chiaroscuro effect. Five additional sculptures are on view: 'violenza casuale', where a wooden beam is crushed by a hydraulic piston until it shatters; 'paradoxical nature of life', featuring a glass slab bending under a large boulder; 'marcus', a tire crushed and deformed by a steel vise; and two versions of 'no memory without loss', three-meter-diameter disks coated with high-viscosity industrial oil that slowly rotates and drips to the floor. Sassolino describes the exhibition as a step toward 'liberating matter from a predetermined form, allowing it to become time.'